Idon’t know what all that was about,” said Gregory. Brian didn’t answer.

Gregory continued, “I mean, beyond the obvious. The Plain That Has No Name. The Plateau That Cannot Be Uttered. The Butte We Just Don’t Talk About.”

“Yeah,” said Brian.

“What’s the matter?” asked Gregory.

“Gregory…,” said Brian. He didn’t continue.

“Come on. We need to think about how to get past the ogre.”

Brian nodded. After a minute, though, he said, “I’m worried about Kalgrash.”

Gregory said, “You think he’s a machine.”

Brian frowned. “And I think he doesn’t know it.”

Gregory clamped his hands under his arms. He bit his lip. “Hey,” he said, his face brightening. “I got it. I think I’ve got it!”

“What?”

“The next object we have to use. To get past the ogre. I figured it out.”

Brian rubbed his scalp. He said, “I wasn’t even thinking about that.”

Gregory, caught up in his own enthusiasm, began kicking a stick back and forth across the clearing. He chased it. “Aren’t you going to ask?” he said.

Brian sighed. “Go ahead.”

“Snarth has no eyes. He found us with his sense of smell.” Gregory kept playing soccer with his stick. “What we have to do is get rid of our smell.”

“Uh-huh,” said Brian. His eyes were on the ground.

“The perfume! The scentless de-scentifying perfume! We have to put on the scentless perfume from the basement.”

Brian nodded.

Gregory passed the stick to Brian. The stick hit Brian’s leg and stopped. Gregory said, “Aren’t you proud of me?”

“Sure,” said Brian, like he wasn’t.

“What’s wrong?”

Brian shrugged.

“The house,” said Gregory, slowing down. “This means we’re going to have to go back to the house. I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there by now. This is going to be terrifying. A real adventure.”

“Your Uncle Max said Prudence would be safe.”

“Yeah,” said Gregory, “but are we?” He slapped Brian on the arm. “Let’s go,” he went on. “We’ll talk about how we’re going to get in on the way.”

Gregory set off, and Brian followed him.

“Can we just not talk for a minute?” said Brian.

“We need to have a strategy.”

“There are other things we need to talk about.”

“Look,” said Gregory, “we’ll see Kalgrash on the way, okay?”

Brian nodded. Gregory was walking ahead of him, so he didn’t see.

They found their way through the Tangled Knolls and wandered through the woods. The leaves were somber—dark browny violets and lusterless browns. As they crossed the Golden Field toward the Troll Bridge, they heard Kalgrash singing to himself in a high, whistling voice. The words were not in English.

He was fishing off the bridge, humming and singing some weird waltz. He reeled in his line and swung the rod over his head in a flourish. He cast far off down the river.

He saw the boys walking toward him down the bank.

“Howdy!” he crowed. “How did things go? Solve it all yet?”

Gregory and Brian waved feebly and walked solemnly across the bridge toward him. Their caps were missing, their overcoats bore dark, dirty stains, their scarves sprouted numerous pulls, and their blankets hung slightly out of their bulging backpacks.

“Hey, hey, hey! What’s the matter?”

“Um, hi,” said Brian.

Gregory walked forward and went behind the troll. Kalgrash protested, “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Just stand still for a second,” Gregory ordered quietly. He ran his hand along the troll’s slick back. “I’m looking for something.”

“Gregory…,” warned Brian.

“What’s wrong? Hey, are you taping something back there? ‘Kick me’ or something?”

Gregory said, “Here. Feel this.”

The troll bent his elbow backward and poked with his spindly finger at the spot where Gregory had tapped. “Oh. Back acne again. It used to happen all the time,” he explained nervously.

Gregory said, “See, Kalgrash…”

Brian interrupted him. “Gregory,” he said. “I don’t know…”

“What?” said Kalgrash. “Tell me.”

Gregory explained, “We’ve just been up to the top of the mountain. We found some elf or something…someone named Sniggleping. He makes magical mechanical creatures and people. He…told us about them. He said that they have holes in their backs, where you have to stick a key to wind them up.”

“What do you mean? Oh, hey…yeah, sure, funny.”

Gregory and Brian looked at each other. “No,” said Brian. “We’re not kidding.”

“Oh, come on. You’re kidding.”

Brian and Gregory just were silent. Kalgrash looked from one to the other. Kalgrash said, “You’re trying to convince me I’m some machine?”

Brian said gently, “I’m…afraid so. The elf talked about fits that you might go through when there’s magical activity at the Ceremonial Mound. The fits…they sound like what happened the other night. When you were visited by those ‘evil spirits.’”

“But, I see them! Wabimalech the Destroyer, and Flaëlphagor the Drooling One. They come to my house! They pull things off the walls! You saw the mess they made…”

Brian shook his head. “We saw you lying on the floor, in some kind of a coma. If you hadn’t told us it was evil spirits, we would have thought that you’d just had a fit and broken everything up. There was really no sign that anyone else had been there. We just assumed it.”

“I’ve seen them!” the troll protested. “More often than I’ve seen you! That’s what they do—they spend their nights carousing, breaking things up, and their days watching television and eating Count Chocula out of the box.”

Gregory turned away, frowning, and leaned his palms on the railing of the bridge.

Kalgrash said, “Hey, I bet you guys are kidding me, huh? A little joke, and you’re about to yell surprise or something? I mean, it’s not my birthday or anything, is it?”

“Kalgrash,” Brian interjected miserably, bowing his head.

“What?” said the troll. “What?!?”

Brian asked quietly, “Why did you follow the Speculant’s commands? What makes you want to stop people on the bridge and tell them the riddle?”

“Well, I just…I feel it. It’s just who I am. It’s what makes sense. What do you mean?”

“I think…,” said Brian, “…I think that maybe it’s what you were made to do…I don’t mean that in a way like…” But he couldn’t think of anything else to say, and they all fell silent.

Hesitantly, the troll reached back and felt the spot on his back again. It was unmistakable—although invisible, there was a small metal ring there, where one could insert a key. Suddenly, the troll protested, “But I have all my memories! I remember everything! Well, not everything, but some things. I just can’t be a machine.”

“It…it doesn’t matter, Kalgrash,” Brian soothed awkwardly.

“I’m not a machine! I’m not! I’m not! I’m not!” shouted the troll. His shout turned to a whimper. “I’m not.” He paused, staring down between the slats of the railing to where slick boulders glistened beneath the frigid river water. “My memories…what about them?”

“Programmed,” said Gregory from the railing.

Brian glared at Gregory, and quickly supplied, “The elf, he said he’d made complete memories for the servants up at the house. He…”

“It can’t be. What if I’m…but I…” The troll leaned his fishing rod against the railing and sat down, his legs dangling over the edge. “Not real. None of it. Made for your Game. Hah. Clockwork and gears.” He reached up slowly and put his hand to where his heart beat. “Clockwork and gears. Pistons.” Brian sat next to him. The troll didn’t look up, but merely said, “Available while supplies last. Limited warranty.” Angrily, he added, “It’s not true. It’s not!”

Brian stared guiltily at the water. He urged, without much conviction, “We’re…we’re all machines, really, Kalgrash. That’s the thing. Our heart’s just a machine, too—a biological machine. No magic whatsoever. Our brain—it’s just electrical signals. See, it’s not that different. I mean, you at least have magic worked into your system. We don’t. We’re just plain matter.”

“Yeah…yeah. Thank you,” said the troll, subdued, nodding. He stood up. “Excuse me,” he said quietly. “I’m…I’m going for a little walk. Go in and get yourselves something to eat or something and I’ll…I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“We’ll—why don’t we come back here in a couple of hours?” said Brian. “We have to go to the house to get something to solve a riddle. On the way back, we’ll stop here and see…how you’re…doing.”

“If you want to,” said the troll. “If.” He nodded. He slowly walked to the end of the bridge and tromped off along the shore.

Gregory turned and looked after him, hands in pockets, then moved to stand next to Brian. Brian moved the other way. He didn’t want to watch the troll. He could tell the troll didn’t want to be watched.

“Let’s keep walking,” said Brian.

They headed toward the mansion.

Brian was miserable. “We shouldn’t have told him,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Gregory. “We should have let it drop.”

“Why did you tell him in the first place?”

Gregory kicked his way through the leaves. Neither of them spoke.

They kept walking toward the house.

The troll wandered down along the river, picking his way over boulders and browning moss, leaping over rivulets. Dead leaves were flying downstream, dipping and twirling as they bounced through pools and over currents.

Kalgrash thought about what he should do. He could race up the mountain, ax in his hand, and find the elf who had been so callous as to create him just for a Game. He knew that would be a troll’s solution. Most people like to take apart their problems, look at them in smaller, more manageable pieces. Trolls, he mused, simply take this to the extreme. Trolls get a certain satisfaction out of seeing their enemies made insignificant and ridiculous—harm-less pieces, spread over a room. No, he decided, not that. He was not a troll, after all. He was a bad imitation.

A sour sickness came over him at the thought of his pathetic jokes, his stupid innocence—he had been made to be silly, been made imperfect. Every thought was a whir of gears; even the thought that every thought was a whir of gears was just a whir of gears. He could break down, like the stove or plumbing, frizzled by lightning or local spell-casting interference. He watched his knees work as he walked, his arms shift to balance him, and thought, What spindly, ridiculous little limbs. What a stupid shape.

The last of the geese were flying overhead, honking in V-formation.

Kalgrash walked along on a path he had made over the last few years that rambled beside the moss-covered slabs surrounding the river. He broke out of the forest into a field where, sometimes, there were cows kept by a farm nearby. The cows weren’t there.

Kalgrash crossed the field, the dead yellow grasses thrashing around his legs. Under a shadowy stand of maples, there was a plot marked out with an old black iron fence. As Kalgrash forced open the rusty gate, he plucked off the leaves that were impaled on the spikes of the fence.

He stood inside the plot, looking from stone to leaf-clogged stone. His eyes passed from Elijah Newcastle to Betty Newcastle without registering the names. He walked between the slate markers to two wooden crosses jammed into the ground at lopsided angles. His father and mother. What, he wondered, would he find if he dug down? Didn’t he remember digging them, one by one, on wintry days?

All I have is memories, he mused. But if his parents had been real—if bodies had really been lying there inert in those graves, beneath those crosses—if there had been a mother who wore a flowered apron and spoke softly with a Scandinavian accent, a father who wore cologne and carved oak grizzlies for tourists with his ax—even if these things he remembered were true—then still, all he would have would be memories. They were good memories.

The flowers were withering on his fake mother’s grave. He would have to bring her some more. They would curl and brown above the empty earth where she didn’t lie.

The geese were passing over. Great storm clouds were gathering in the south—he could feel them—and they would sweep north, leaving winter wherever they passed.